Quotes: Reflections on machines

1920s and 1930s

"Now we cannot abolish machinery, because machinery lies in the very essence of life and we ourselves are machines. But, as the largest part of history shows, there is no need whatever for man to become the slave of machinery, or even for machinery to injure the quality of his own work; rightly used it may improve it. The greatest task before civilisation at present is to make machines what they ought to be, the slaves, instead of the masters of men; and if civilisation fails at the task, then without doubt it and its makers will go down to a common destruction."
— Havelock Ellis. On Life and Sex: Essays of Love and Virtue. Two Volumes in One. New York: Garden City Publishing Company, Inc. 1937. (Formerly Little Essays of Love and Virtue, 1921, and More Essays of Love and Virtue, 1931.) Vol 1., p. 177.

1960s and 1970s

"...we should tailor our intelligent opportunist advances to our basic behavioural requirements. We must somehow improve in quality rather than in sheer quantity. If we can do this, we can continue to progress technologically in a dramatic and exciting way without denying our evolutionary inheritance. If we do not, then our suppressed biological urges will build up and up until the dam bursts and the whole of our elaborate existence is swept away in the flood."
— Desmond Morris. The Naked Ape. New York: Dell, 1967. p 197.

"It isn't the machine that dehumanizes, it is the system that tends to enslave man."
— William A. Spurner. Natural Law and the Ethics of Love: A New Synthesis. Philadelphia: The Westminster Press, 1974. p 141.

1990s

"[Samuel] Butler conceded that machines were still governed by their makers, but, surveying the marvels of nineteenth-century technology, he wondered if that would always be true: 'We are daily giving them greater power and supplying by all sorts of ingenious contrivances that self-regulating, self-acting power which will be to them what intellect has been to the human race.' ... 'There is nothing which our infatuated race would desire more," he quipped, "than to see a fertile union between two steam engines.'"
— Lynn Margulis and Dorion Sagan. Microcosmos. California: University of California Press, 1986, 1997. p. 257.

"[In an automated world,] human artists will become the most valued and irreplaceable of professionals."
— "The Creators," Bran Ferren, The New York Times Magazine, September 19, 1999, p 54.

2000s

"Between 1840 and 1879 alone, these [innovations] included the electric telegraph, the telephone, the lightbulb, the transcontinental railroad, and the passenger elevator. Tasks that had been taken for granted since the dawn of civilization were suddenly no longer required, or were performed in utterly new ways. Tasks that had always been performed by human flesh were taken over by machines. Motion and light and time and space and talk, and thus reality itself, morphed radically within a single generation..."
— Anneli Rufus. Party of One: The Loner's Manifesto. Da Capo Press, 2003. p. 98.

2010s

"John Henry was a steel-driving railroad worker in the South in the 1800s whose story has become legend. … When the steel-driving machine arrived to replace Henry and the other steel-drivers he battled the machine, carrying with him his pride and the honor of humankind. … Henry surely pushed his heart and lungs well past their potential because he won the battle against the steel-driving machine and then he collapsed, dead of a stroke or a heart attack.
In modern psychology John Henryism is the idea that exposure to social discrimination can lead some Blacks to put in extraordinary effort in pursuit of success and a repudiation of racism, resulting in a steep physiological cost. Blacks who have extra human reasons why they need to win — to prove that they have been wrongly judged and the stereotype against Blacks is wrong and that the expectation of failure is undeserved — may find themselves working incredibly hard and straining the edge of their physical, mental, and human capabilities as John Henry did."
— Touré, Who's Afraid of Post-Blackness?: What it Means to Be Black Now. New York: Free Press, 2011.

2020s

"The notion that textile workers like Ben Bamforth and George Mellor would discuss the prospect of losing their agency to machines in the early 1800s, when the machinery in question was a wooden, water-powered loom, may strike us as implausible. Our twenty-first-century visions of displacement by machines, after all, concern omniscient artificial intelligences and sleek autonomous robotics. But George and Ben's argument was colored by deeper anxieties, too — what is the value of human labor, they wondered, or even human life, in a world where technologies seem constantly poised to replace us? In fact, it's remarkably similar to debates we're still having two hundred years later, in books like Rise of the Robots, film franchises like Terminator, and cable news segments about the looming AI takeover."
— Brian Merchant. Blood in the Machine: The Origins of the Rebellion Against Big Tech. Little Brown and Company, 2023.